ART DUBAI

Art Dubai is the principal art fair of the Gulf: four days each spring at Madinat Jumeirah, weighted toward work from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa that is rarely shown together anywhere else.

It was the first fair of its kind in the region, and it arrived before most of the museums did.

The Fair

Art Dubai was founded in 2007, when the Gulf had money, collectors and ambition, and little of the machinery of an art world to go with them. Its first editions brought galleries in from abroad. Its lasting achievement was to give the region’s own galleries, and those of South Asia and Africa, a place to be seen by everyone else.

It grew with the institutions around it. Sharjah had held a biennial since the 1990s. Galleries took over warehouses in Al Quoz and became Alserkal Avenue. Abu Dhabi opened a Louvre in 2017. In 2025 Dubai announced a museum of art of its own, by Tadao Ando, to stand on the water of the Creek.

From the start the fair has kept a forum of talks beside it, the Global Art Forum, where the region’s arguments about itself are had in public.

What Sells Here

The fair keeps a section for the modernists of the twentieth century: painters who were celebrated in Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran or Lahore and barely collected outside them for decades. Much of the best of it cannot be bought anywhere else, because nobody else shows it.

Bawwaba, Arabic for gateway, has been given since 2019 to newly made work from across the Global South, each presentation the work of a single artist.

Madinat Jumeirah is a resort built as an imagined old Arabian town, with wind towers, a souk and canals crossed by small boats, and the fair spreads through its halls and along its water.

What to Know

The dates move. The fair has been held in March and in April, and its dates should be confirmed each year before anything is booked.

The preview days, before it opens to the public, are when the collectors are there.

Alserkal Avenue holds its own art week alongside the fair, and its galleries are worth an afternoon.

Spring in Dubai is hot by day and fine by night, and the fair’s evenings are the best of it.

The Court

Art Dubai is not the Court’s own. Places at the preview, introductions to the galleries a member wants to see, and invitations to the evenings of the week are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the visit: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Because the dates move, the Court confirms them with members each winter.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.